MY LIFE IN HORROR: DON’T THEY KNOW THE RULES??

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.


Don’t They know The Rules??

Content note: discussions of racism, which includes use of racial slurs.

It’s 13th June 2017. And, accompanied by my dear friends Justin, Duncan and Rob, as well as my stepson, I’m inside my favourite music venue in the country (at least since they tore down The Astoria; yes, still bitter, thanks for checking); Brixton Academy, London.


We’ve had a beer and some grub in a nearby bar, and, T-Shirt acquired, we’re positioning ourselves in a good spot; centre stage, far enough back to hopefully not get caught in the initial crush, but plenty close enough to soak up the considerable atmosphere. 


And, sure, the boy and I had seen them just the previous weekend, as part of probably my favourite Download 3 day weekend ever, and they had been Mighty… but this was Brixton fucking Acadamy, and the crowd was, and I believe the kids used to say, lit. And as well as Prophets Of Rage had gone down in front of the Download crowd (very, very well indeed), the intimacy of this show, a feeling like we were in on the ground floor of what was sure to become a world-beating colossus of hip-hop/metal supergroupery, promised something truly epic.


So, we’re in the pit, and getting ready for some moderately serious jumping up and down action, and the reception that greets DJ Lord is raucous and rapturous. He acknowledges the crowd, and with an obligatory ‘Make some noise!’ (we do), he starts doing his thing.


And 90 seconds in, a guitar riff comes rolling out the speakers….


And suddenly it’s, fuck, mid to late 90’s and I’m an angry young teen, and I’m browsing The Ghosts moderately sizable cassette tape collection, and I notice the black on red script, gothic style, single word.


I pull it out, look at the cover. The image is so dark it’s hard to make out, but I can just about see a painting of a bare-chested, muscular, angry-looking black man, with a gun in his belt, and that same word - band or album name? - half on either side of him, in two columns.


“Is this any good?”


He looks up. “Yeah, it’s good. Heavy. It’s Ice T, but it’s metal.”


Huh.


I know of Ice T, of course; even in whitebread North Devon, we’ve heard of Ice T. I will have known very little about the man, and what I did ‘know’ was likely playground bullshit, potentially even filtered through second-hand tabloid panic, laundered by schoolkids too dumb to even know that’s what they were doing, absorbed by me, also too dumb to know better. Still, the name carried weight, cache. All I really knew was Ice T was Cool, and a Bad Ass. Despite the seismic influence of Rage Against The Machine, I still wasn’t connecting with hip-hop in a wider sense; screaming guitars still basically owned my soul, and with the depth of my passion and the shallowness of my pockets, I didn’t really have any way to explore other genres if I’d wanted to.


Still…


Ice T.


And Metal.


Interesting.


It opens with something that I now know as a standard of hip hop albums, but which at the time was deliciously alien to me; a skit. Ice T gets a gun from Mooseman (bass player in the band, we learn in the following track), goes over to a policeman, asks him for help changing a flat tyre, then shoots him.


The track is called Smoked Pork.
​
A guitar starts chugging. A siren wails. A voice says the name. Another voice yells “YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER!”. A second guitar joins. The drums roll in.


“BODYCOUNT!!”


Over a riff and chant (hypnotic, repetition, bodycount, bodcount), we hear the sounds of a car chase; police sirens, squealing tyres, gunfire popping off. The guitars are immense. As they drop into the second riff (still no sign of anything so dull as a verse or chorus) Ernie C shreds a wild flurry of notes out into a wailing bend that gives me chills. 


I have no idea what’s going on. It sounds like someone wrote a song to recreate the feeling of playing GTA; like, fuck verses, fuck choruses, just pure riff and attitude, get it.


I do. By the time Ice T has introduced the band and taken us back into the… verse? First riff? I am sold. It’s fucking glorious. “BODYCOUNT, MOTHERFUCKER!” I yell, then and now, joining in with Ice T as the song ends.


And, you know, sure, back then I couldn’t really say there was nothing like it, because I was a teenager, fucking everything was new to me; I had no idea what musical innovation really sounded like. I didn't have the terms of reference. I liked how RATM had made me feel, I liked how Bodycount was making me feel…. But I also liked how GnR and WASP made me feel, and I’d never heard anything like them, either. 


But coming back to BodyCount after thirty years… man, there really wasn’t anything quite like this, was there?


Sure, as noted above, the constant interjections - Opera, Now Sports, A Statistic - mirror hip hop ‘skits’ (though there’s not much in terms of humour, here), but there’s also the fact that there are no less than three tunes named after the band (the album opens with the one/two punch Bodycount’s In The House and Bodycount, with Bodycount Anthem towards the end of side 2), which, what? 


Then there’s the, uh, eccentric approach to song structure. So, in addition to the opener, whose lyrics consist entirely of the word Bodycount repeated a lot, the band being introduced like at a live show, and the phrase ‘Bodycount’s in the house!’, we have Bodycount, with a long spoken-word intro over a gently picked guitar riff, before, for the first time on the album, we get into something that resembles a verse/chorus structure. And even there, after the second verse, we get a drum solo into chorus into an extended guitar solo. And I want to be clear; it’s not that it’s bad. It is not bad. It’s pretty fucking awesome, combining a punk inventiveness and energy with metal musicality, and all the muscle of both, with the continued vibe of a live show (‘Yo, Beatmaster V! Take these motherfuckers to South Central!’). It’s a pure adrenaline shot, and in many ways it’s almost an ideal of metal, shedding the flab the genre is not infrequently known for, but preserving the musicianship. And this persists; There Goes The Neighborhood, Evil Dick, and Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight have similarly gonzo structures, and KKK Bitch has spoken intros to each verse, setting up the scene.


And sure, coming back after 30 years, it’s not flawless. Bowels Of The Devil is a metal/hardcore riff for the ages, but the lyric is pretty basic, and the chorus punchline (‘And you don’t want to die there! They call it going out the back door!’) only really lands the first time. Similarly, Voodoo chugs along perfectly serviceably, but there just isn’t enough there there in the lyric to really sustain the song. And I’m never going to be a fan of anti-drugs ballads like The Winner Loses; the sincerity is there, and the directness is admirable (opening line: ‘My friend’s addicted to cocaine’ lets you know what you’re in for), but it’s a genre that basically always bugs me. Like, I don’t even dig She Talks To Angels, you know?


Elsewhere, though, hearing the album is throwing open all these doors of memory; reconnecting me with a very teenage sense of rage at the state of the world that never entirely left, and seems to be resurging with some force as I approach the midway point of my fourth decade on this planet, given, well *gestures at the absolute state of the world*. But remembering that sad, angry, scared, lonely teenage boy, listening to this album at stupid volumes, I guess there are two things I really have to get into; the anti-racism, and the misogyny.


Let’s start with the anti-racism. As I may have mentioned before, I spent most of my childhood in one of the whitest areas of the country, if not the planet. In my entire school career, there was exactly one Asian kid, and zero teachers of colour; and that includes school and college. What flows from that? Well, I was raised leftie, and I knew discrimination was Wrong. And I think my mum’s feminism, especially, gave me a leg up, purely in terms of a ‘people have the right to do what they want, and love who they love’ mentality. At the same time, the absence of any chance for first-hand experience of anyone not-white led to a shy awkwardness, when I finally made it to London. I fucking loved the multiculturalism of that city - hell, still do - but I carried a mortal dread of saying or doing something stupid out of the ignorance I knew I carried, and, yeah, that took a bit of time to process. 


And that was compounded by the fact that the shared ignorance of my young white peers (alongside, in some cases, some good old fashioned bigotry) meant there was a lot of racism around me in Devon; at school, at college, and in society in general. Random examples float into memory; the bizarre piece of graffiti on a wooden locker at college, where someone had written across the dark door in tippex the phrase ‘Ja Rasta Fart’; the late 20s guy who, as part of a wider conversation about whether or not jealousy was innate to the human condition or a social construct, calmly asserted to me that he believed white and black people had evolved entirely separately. The apparently nice eccentric older gentleman who wandered around town barefoot, and was always up for a chat, who, upon hearing I was moving to London, frowned and said “Why would you want to do that? It’s full of wogs!”.


And the endless jokes about black people.


And I just can’t. And I don’t need to. You’ve heard them, one way or another, and I can see no value in rehearsing them here, devoid as they are of any scintilla of merit, as harmful as I now know them to be, as shameful as it is to recall now how I would listen, and God help me, sometimes even repeat these… I mean, jokes are meant to be funny, and they aren’t, so, I don’t even know what to say. I was young, I was dumb, I was surrounded by assholes, and I am deeply ashamed, and that’s kind of it, really.


I also, and I do want to note this, did know it was wrong.


I say that not to excuse, incidentally, rather the reverse. What kind of person, even a kid, goes along with something they know is wrong, harmful, for… what? Some kind of shitty awful badge of ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’? Some imbecilic and not remotely thought through ‘commitment’ to ‘free speech’? Repeating lies I knew were harmful to impress people I didn’t even like?


Jesus, what a wretch.


But that knowing it was wrong, that did matter.


Because when Bodycount came along, they were ready as fuck for my dumb white ass. And they had some shit to tell me.


There Goes The Neighbourhood is the riff DJ Lord hit that sent me spinning down the memory hole, even as I joined the crowd in a roar of approval. Jesus, that riff. And then the title, delivered staccato as the drums crash in, and then that piledriver verse riff as Ice T just rips the lid off. Earlier, on The Real Problem, he’d spoken about the fear of white kids liking a black artist; on this track, he takes that up to eleven, directly addressing racism in rock by ventriloquising the meathead position. He’s dropped n-bombs throughout the record, but here it’s different. Here, he’s voicing the ugliness, the fear, the hate. 


And, I mean, by this point, the start of side two, he’s completely won me over. This is a fucking awesome metal album, with a bluntness and brutality I’ve seldom experienced but always been looking for, and a (mostly) righteous fury that I feel as my own, despite the chasms of life experience and culture that divide us (and, fucking hell, isn’t that the point of music, of art, when you get down to it? Aren’t we all reaching out for that, either as creators or audience?). And if you want to call bullshit on a dorky white teenager in North Devon finding music written by a black man from LA relatable, I of course can’t really argue… but it doesn’t change how I felt, or how I feel now, as I listen back to the album.


I do feel a connection. And hearing There Goes The Neighbourhood, especially the breakdown when Ice T announces ‘We’re here/ we ain’t going nowhere/ we’re moving right next door to you/ Bodycount, motherfucker!’, man, my teenage fist is punching the air in mute agreement. 


And by taking on the stupid, racist position in the verses, the moral vacuum of that stance was revealed to me on a visceral level, in a way that no amount of well-meaning teaching about ‘we’re all the same’ could ever manage. Like, no disrespect intended to those teachers (well… maybe a bit) but this, this was precision-engineered to reach a kid like me - a white metal dork who knew racism was wrong… but maybe didn’t really understand why on a level beyond the intellectual, not having had occasion to see the impact up close, first hand. 


And then here’s Ice T, who, having kicked my arse for an entire side of punk-metal of variable quality but undeniable energy, gets right up in my fucking face and over the best riff on an album with an abundance of face-melters, says, in effect, ‘whose side are you on?’


And the correct answer on this issue, then and now; your side, Ice T. I’m with you. And I can’t unsay the things I said as a child, but I can - I could, I did - commit to talking less bullshit and more truth, from that point on. And it did mark a moment for me, a before-and-after, both in terms of how I’d behave, and what behaviour I’d tolerate in the people close to me. Looking back, Bodycount was the moment I first grasped that anti-racism was a verb, not a noun - not something you are, but something you either do, or do not.


Man, it’s really tempting to end things there. But, well, there is the small matter of the album’s cartoonishly awful misogyny.


Now, as we’ll be covered in posts past and future, this isn’t an issue particular to Ice T, or Hip Hop, or metal. It does, however, feature prominently in all those forms, and as uplifting as the anti-racism message of Bodycount is, if I’m being honest, I do also have to reckon with the comfort zone that the likes of Guns and Roses had given me for misogynistic art.


Because I mean, fucking hell.


Women, on this album, exist exclusively as objects of lust, or as pains in the ass, and that’s it. Voodoo features a woman with a voodoo doll fucking up Ice T just, you know, because, and Evil Dick features a sequence that is toe-curling even by Rocket Queen standards. And sure, that last is clearly a tongue-in-cheek riff on, as the Oprah intro phrases it, ‘male promiscuity’; still, it’s not exactly not a celebration of fucking whoever you want. And to be clear, as long as there’s enthusiastic consent, fine, but… well, I just think it’s not ideal if half the population is reduced entirely to their potential appeal as sexual partners, as opposed to being, you know, fully functional human beings.


And the two tracks where this tendency becomes most apparent and egregious are where the two themes collide; KKK Bitch and Mama’s Gotta Die Tonight.


KKK Bitch has some of the feel of a skit, given the aforementioned spoken intros to each verse, and sure, the story of Ice T dating the daughter of a KKK Grand Wizard is, I mean, if you’re not already grinning or even laughing at the concept, I dunno what to tell you. And it is, transparently, a gag, to be clear - right down to the third verse intro where Ice T says ‘...it really don’t matter, if you from mars and you got a pussy, we will fuck you, and you know that’s all we tryin’ to say…’


And I can’t tell you if that’s a funny line on the page, but in the context of a song where Ice T is touring southern states with Bodycount and shagging all the white women whose racist boyfriends can’t satisfy them, the way he delivers it… look, I’ll own that it still makes me grin.


At the same time, the ‘woman as object’ trope is all over the song; Ice T is ‘using’ the daughter to get to her dad; the song even has him getting turned on and having angry sex with her as her old man delivers a racist speech. And she has no appreciable personality or agency of her own, she exists purely to worship Ice T sexually, and…


Like, I get it, I get it, I get it. She’s not real. None of it is real. It’s a story, a goof, a joke, and the punchline is racists are awful. And teenage me is looking at adult me with total confusion, but like…


Well, the problem is, teenage me, and Ice T, for that matter, I guess; you didn’t dig those other jokes that denied humanity and agency to a whole segment of the population. And at this point, I honestly can’t tell if I’m an alien or I’m missing something that’s blindingly obvious to everyone else, but, like; misogyny has a bodycount, too, and violence against women is an endemic and ongoing crime against humanity, and obviously, fuck playing oppression Olympics, and fuck whoever even first coined that hateful phrase, but…


I grin, sure, but the grin doesn’t sit easy. And sometimes I listen, and sometimes, I skip. And I don’t have any answers, and I’m not saying the song shouldn’t exist or that you shouldn’t listen to it or shouldn't enjoy it. I’m just saying I think There Goes The Neighbourhood does it all way better, and doesn’t leave an unpleasant aftertaste.


And then there’s Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight.


And this one’s way tougher for me, because I really fucking like this song. I like it because it comes on like a horror movie, I like it because it’s about anti-racism as a verb, I like it because the core conceit is you really need to fuck off racists in your life, no matter who they are, because racism is Actually Evil. And as we’ve already rehearsed at painful length, that was a message I very much needed to hear, when I first heard it, and the internalisation of that message measurably improved my quality of life.


On the other hand, it’s a song about murdering a woman and chopping her up.


Yeah, but a racist woman, I know, teenage me, I did catch that bit ‘I learned my momma was an evil woman. She hated black people, Mexicans…’ on and on, yup, racism wrong, racists bad, got it. Still, tho… at a certain point, it’s hard not to notice that there’s at least a subtheme of the album, and it’s not ‘women are awesome’. And no, nobody is obliged to put out art that does that, of course not, but… It’s not just me, is it? 


Like, music; at least the music I really love, the stuff that goes down deep and really matters, has always had a liberatory quality; and I know that sounds both corny and laughably subjective, and it is both those things, but it’s also how I feel. And, as with much of the horror  literature I love, there’s a specific liberatory quality to laying bare dark truths; ugly impulses, unworthy thoughts, dangerous, unpleasant beliefs, vomiting them up and really poking about in the chunks and drool, see what’s what. There’s a purging, but also a reckoning; and let’s face it, we vomit for a reason, right? If your body is trying that hard to get rid of something in your stomach, you’re probably better off rid.


And viewed through that lens, and given the utterly pervasive nature of misogynistic patriarchy, the literal and metaphorical stranglehold it has over women and men alike, there’s a case to be made that art that doesn’t at least reflect that to some degree isn’t being honest (well, my kind of art, anyway - I guess utopians get to imagine what humans look like without this poison coursing through every interaction, and good luck to them). And Ice T is an artist, and I can’t see into his soul any more than I can into anyone else’s.


Still, I can’t get away from the lack of challenge. Bodycount, a band of black musicians that Ice T knew would primarily appeal to a white audience, comes right the fuck at racism from the off, understanding that the vast majority of metalheads would embrace the attitude and be moved in the right direction as a result. Bodycount was throwing the best party, and the only price of entry was to reject racism.


And, again, just to be crystal clear, fucking good show.


But there’s nothing here, or, really, in most of the music I love, from that era to this, that challenges the poisons of misogyny or patriarchy. Sure, in grunge, the outright misogyny is mainly absent, and of course, that’s not nothing, but nor is it doing what BC was doing here with racism.


And I think that’s a damn shame.


Not - one more time - because patriarchy was or is Ice-T's problem to solve. But because when I see and hear so much of how men still behave, in the year of our Lord 2022, I feel like a fucking alien, and I just wish some artist had done for them what Ice T did for my dumb teenage racist self.


Still. 30 years on, Bodycount still packs a punch, and I’m grateful to have had it in my life.


KP
16/3/22


PS Prophets Of Rage absolutely killed it. But that’s a story for another day. And, indeed, project.


 :)

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